The Prisoner
by John Poe
Summary: Maintaining your sanity can be an extremely interesting way to pass the time. If you really have the knack for it, the natural talent for finding new and creative ways to keep your mind tethered to reality, then you can spend your entire life sitting in one spot. Or your entire death, if you have the misfortune of having to stay awake through it.


Maintaining sanity can be an extremely interesting way to pass the time. It is certainly not a hobby that everyone is cut out for – in fact, it is an incredibly difficult thing to learn how to do on one's own. But if you really have the knack for it, the natural talent for finding new and creative ways to keep your mind tethered to reality, then you can spend your entire life sitting in one spot. Or your entire death, if you have the misfortune of having to stay awake through it.

In the damp, dreary, disintegrating interior of a fifty square foot cell, there is a woman who has been cursed with that very misfortune. Luckily for her, however, she also has the knackfor not going completely nutty in such situations. Ever since she was a little girl, she had found pleasure in the quiet pursuits of introspection and daydreaming. The smallest detail out her window or the barest fragment of a thought could keep her occupied for hours. The look of a bird's speckled feather. The smell of her own hair. The concept of tomorrow's breakfast. Her parents had been proud to have a daughter with such deep thinking, being scholars themselves, and had entered her into school where she learned how to be even better at thinking about smaller and smaller details for longer and longer periods of time. It pleased her teachers immeasurably to have a young student with original ideas to introduce to the class. After the thirteenth insect collection, a look into the effects of gently blowing into the ear of fifty different breeds of dog was an entertaining, surprisingly educational change.

Her originality became less appreciated as she left her childhood, but she was allowed to continue on in her education and eventually she became a sorceress at the Vinheim Dragon School. She took to magic rather well, but was often ridiculed by her peers for never diversifying into anything beyond one spell. Many called her small minded, but the way she saw it, a true sorcerer should fully understand as much as they can about a spell before moving on to something new. That's the reason why in over four years of study she never once cast anything other than soul arrow. It's also the reason why she died. If she had felt confident enough in her abilities to move on to something more substantial, perhaps she would have been able to incapacitate both of the brigands that slew her at the tender age of twenty two for her catalyst and handful of silver.

She had long ago made peace with her death, however, and had turned to her surroundings and academic study as ways to pass the time until the world ended or rust weakened the bars of her cell enough to be broken through, whichever came first. First she had tried futilely to communicate for a few hours with her undead neighbors who spent their time in their cells blankly moaning or curling up into a ball and not moving at all. Then she spent some time taking in everything about her prison and looking for weaknesses - counting the bricks in the wall and committing each one's numerous cracks and imperfections to memory. Then she tried for a good week to break one brick – but with nothing but brittle pottery shards and her own decayed fingernails to work with there was absolutely no progress. Her final conclusion had been that some sort of strengthening enchantment had probably been placed over the structure. When she finally gave up, she cried for quite some time (or tried to anyway, her tear ducts were as stiff and shriveled up as everything else on her was now that she was undead), then spent a few days counting the number of seconds in between any two given drips of water off of the ceiling into the puddle on the floor out in the hall. The average had been seven point three four seconds. Then she attempted to kill herself. Twice. But both times she woke up, still a corpse, but otherwise unharmed.

After that, in a sort of zen state, she had accepted where she was and decided that she'd make the best of it. She finally forced herself to look at the hideous black, flaming hole branded on her – the darksign that marked her as undead. She did her best to accept it. It wasn't like it was uncommon these days. Like a plague, the darksign had been popping up on more and more of the diseased and slain. In some kingdoms, undead had overrun everything and doomed countless innocents. The best that most could think to do was take undead as far away as possible and lock them up because they all eventually lost their minds and became violent and only temporarily stoppable.

The only thing that really worried her from that point forward was how long it would take her to lose her mind and be like the other gibbering, wailing sad-sacks that lived with her in the asylum. But she tried not to think about it, and that was easy. There was so much else to think about. How her body had changed especially. The way the dried skin and shrunken flesh was simultaneously terrible and wondrous kept her staring at her own hands for longer than she could ever keep track of. How was she not completely rotted through or stiff as a board? Why was her normally cropped brown hair still growing, even when she was not eating or taking in any conceivable form of energy? How did she still have hair at all? How did she still have use of all of her senses even with her eyes and ears and mouth and everything else so obviously altered? She simultaneously wondered what her face looked like and wished to never know. It was ultimately for the best that there was no mirror in her accommodations, she decided. She was a fairly plain girl in life and so had tried to forsake vanity for her own sake, but it was impossible to ignore the fact that she was likely of below-average appearance now.

Her own macabre condition aside, the girl spent time exercising muscles that would never grow, having one sided conversations with neighbors that would never speak, and practicing her soul arrow spell in her head over and over while pretending her pinky finger was the catalyst that would give the spell form. She often made a go at creating imaginary friends, but could never really give them any stock no matter how many times she tried. She also prayed. She wasn't a particularly religious woman and had something of a prejudice against the haughty, sorcery-snubbing clerics of Thorolund, but she prayed anyway because the Gods might not know any of that. And she painted invisible masterpieces and grew fungi gardens and sometimes just sat and waited. Because something always happened. It was usually small. A noise from next door. An old, familiar rat passing near. Something always happened, and it was always a small surprise. And this prisoner discovered that her favorite thing in a cell that usually stayed the same was a small surprise.

All told, five years passed in this fashion for her. As this time passed, she started doing more and more waiting and less and less everything else. The surprises became what she (sort of) lived for. Really, even though she definitely had a knack for staying sane, sometimes she seriously considered stripping down to her skivvies and rolling around on the floor with her tongue out like all the other cool zombies.

So it was good that, on this particular day, she had a really big surprise.

A lot of really big surprises, really – surprises that all came together to be the biggest surprise of not just her stay here in prison, but of her entire life.

The first was a shuffling sound. At first, she thought that the sound was just one of her insane friends, but it was coming from the ceiling, and no rat made a noise that loud. No, it definitely sounded like-

_Sckweeeee-_

The second surprise. The reluctant cry of heavy metal being lifted from it's resting place. And it sounded so sharp and... close. Her eyes lifted up slowly from the line in the ground they had been retracing and were met by something they hadn't seen in a decade – bright, blinding sunlight! Yes, there, up in the ceiling! There was no mistaking it, the ceiling had opened up! This was unprecedented! How had the rats managed to get up there, much less lift off part of the ceiling?

_THUNK_

The third surprise! Something dropped in the cell from the sky - heavy and exciting, a present from above, something new to examine and learn from and distract; but for now even this world-changing boon was ignored because of the fifth surprise – the one who had thrown the present down.

Framed by the still painfully bright sunlight knelt a shining figure of metal, glinting and softly clanking as its joints shifted. It's face was completely hidden by a helmet with full visor, but it seemed to carry itself as a man, squatting with an obvious weight in it's posture and... something else too. Curiosity? It lingered like one of the friendlier rats on the edge of her world, as if considering coming down. Or maybe it thought she looked interesting. After all, the prisoner was certainly staring. This thing looked to be a literal knight in shining armor. She could not believe her eyes. Maybe she had finally succeeded at making an imaginary friend. If so, she was proud of herself. It was so lifelike. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, but then it turned away and was gone.

"Wait..." She whispered. Offhand, she realized she hadn't really said anything out loud in a few months and so her mouth wasn't quite working right. "Wait..."

At least it had the courtesy to leave the skylight open. Might be a bit uncomfortable next rain, but worth it for the view. There were clouds up there.

"Gah!" She had to look away and rub at her eye sockets. The sun was so bright, it was enough to make her want to curl up and hold her filthy hat over her face. But the pain was joy, because it was different. She could keep herself entertained for another year at least with just the sun and sky, but her benefactor had also gifted her with this- this...

She looked at the object, no, person before her. It looked like a recently killed undead. There were deep gouges across the thing's chest and a huge gaping wound in the gut – it looked as if it had been skewered all the way through. It wasn't moving. But if it was in fact undead, it probably soon would.

"A new friend..." While the novelty would be nice for a time, if it was in fact insane, it could also be very unpleasant. Just as the words left her mouth, the prisoner saw something clutched in the poor creature's hand. It was rusty, caked in old blood, and broken in half, but the object used to be a sword. The possibilities with this were endless! Haircuts, a new tool to hack at the bars to the door, if this roommate thing doesn't work out, something to kill him with over and over again...

It took some prying to get it out of the cold dead hands, but the broken sword was soon hers. She held it up manically and watched the filthy blade shine in the light, then slid it into the folds of her pants. With this and the new window, things were looking up – and the adrenaline rush that her dried up old brain was pumping through her body was an amazing high unlike anything she had ever experienced - but nothing could have prepared her for the last surprise. After hurriedly searching through the pockets of her dead friends for more toys, another glinting piece of metal was soon in the light. It was small, it fit in the palm of her hand, and it made her more afraid than anything she had even seen in her life or death.

At first she could say and do nothing. It had her completely frozen. In shock. Then her jaw started to rattle.

"K-k-kuh-kay-k-k-k-"

She was trembling as she turned it over in her hand, staring disbelievingly at it. She suddenly dropped it and hoped it would disappear and stop taunting her. The sharp ringing of metal on stone cut through the air.

"K-K-Kuu-ka-key-ka-key-"

This was it. She had obviously gone insane. It was impossible that all of these things had happened. Nothing more exciting than a hatching mosquito had ever graced her cell in five years. A huge glittering knight ripping apart the ceiling and throwing her a dead man with a key was her subconscious mind demanding she escape reality or something. This wasn't real. Or if it was real, this could be any key. It could be the key to the knight's wine cellar. Or the key to the third cell down the hall. This wasn't the real key to the cell. It couldn't be. And she couldn't let herself hope that it was. Because if she put the key into the door and it did not turn that would be it. She'd crack. She'd cut herself into pieces thin enough to get through the bars with the sword hilt and try to put herself back together. She'd lose it. This was not a key.

She dove on to it.

"KEY! KEEEEY. THIS IS A KEY! Key. Key. Eee. Key. KEYKEYKEYKEYKEY!"

She couldn't help it. This was it. She was gambling her sanity on this one. This key. This knight. This sun. This had to be real.

She held the key in a fist made of both hands. She couldn't drop it again. What if it went through the door bars and she couldn't reach it? What if the others stole it from her? No, this key was going in the door.

"S-slowly..." she told herself. "Calm. I'm calm. I've been here this long. I can wait another ten seconds to get there..."

Her eyes stared directly down, refusing to blink. Somehow she knew that the key would cease to exist if she stopped looking. Her knees quaked. Her arms trembled. All she could think of was dropping the key and losing it.

Then a dull pain. Her head had collided with the jagged bars of the door. It was enough to jar her from her panic for a moment and she couldn't help but give a giddy laugh at it all. What if this was the key? What if it really was? Maybe somebody sent the man to rescue her? Maybe the man was a traveling hero, rescuing undead damsels because he has a thing for females that look like dried jerky?

She gave herself about a five percent chance that this wasn't all a fevered delusion. But the chance was enough to have her hand stop shaking. As casually as she could she fed the key into the door and listened to the drag of the lock's pins against the key's teeth.

"On the count of three." She clenched her hands into painful fists.

"One." She bit her lip.

"Two." She closed her eyes.

"Three." She thought about her seeing her family again.

And couldn't turn it. It was just too much. Too much can be wrong. Somebody out there might throw her right back in her cell. They must have guards. She looked down at the rusty sword hilt stuffed in her waistband. If anybody tried to put her back into a prison, she'd try to kill them. But with only this and no catalyst...

Suddenly, she found the courage to twist the key. After all, if she couldn't even turn a key, how could she kill a prison guard?

But it wouldn't budge.

She tried again.

And again.

"No." She tried turning it the other way.

"No..." She tried again. She tried again. And again. Again. Again. Again. Againagainagainagainagin. She tried harder. And harder. Harder. HARDER.

"No. No. No. Let me out." She begged as she kept turning. "Please let me out. Please. Please, oh gods please..."

The sound of the key uselessly tapping the side of the lock sounded like an evil laugh.

"Let me out, pleasePleasePleasePlease! WORK! LET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE! HELP!"

For the first time in three years, she screamed.

"HELP! SOMEBODY! PLEASE HELP ME! PLEASE!"She screamed as loudly and as long as she could. She screamed to her deaf undead companions and she screamed towards the light in her ceiling. She screamed at the key. Every profanity and curse she could think of she screamed at the key. She told the key of all the horrible things she would do to it over the course of the next decade should it not open the door. Then she stopped and took the key out of the lock, closed her eyes again and held it close to her mouth and whispered to it. Apologies and promises and more threats.

Then she slid it slowly back into the lock as far as it would go and then she kicked it in again with her foot, which made a distressing _clink_ sound.

That _clink_ made her stock still.

"Hah. I see," she pronounced after some time, her face expressionless and her voice sounding for all the world like she was back at the university presenting a theorem, "that sound probably means that I have just broken off the head of the key and may never be able to fit another key into this door ever again. It's just as well." She drew the broken sword and began to absentmindedly prick her fingers on the jagged edge of the blade.

"It's about time I gave up anyway, this whole series of events has shown me the light!" She began laughing at the horrible sunlight streaming in. She had just now noticed that it was making shadows of prison bars cover the walls.

"Maybe I can just slit my throat..." The words were thoughtful and calm. Rational. "And whenever I wake up, just... slit it again! Then I wouldn't have to spend much time here at all, really!" She laughed again.

She took another look at the key jutting out of the door and prepared herself to realize the full extent of her failure. She placed an exhausted hand on the key. Her classmates had been right about her. She was useless. And small minded. And an idiot. It's why she was dead. It's why she ended up here. It's why she'd never ever get out. It's why it was better to just give up.

Still.

Just one more try.

A little twist to the right.

_Clink._


End file.
